The Arizona sentinel., 1887-02-12
SWEDISH KNACKRROp.
The staff of Life in One of Sweden's Bis-
 toric Mining Towns.

The Staff Of Life in One of Sweden's Bis-
 tOric Mining Towns.
 At Falun we found the average Swedish inn, with a cheerless dining room. where each table was piled high with knackbrod, enough on each table to feed twenty soldiers. The knack- brod is a national institution and sign surer than any sign post or front fer stone to tell one that he is in Swe- den. It is made of rye or barley flour, mixed with potatoes and quantities of carroway seeds; is baked in thin sheets a foot in diameter, with hole in the middle, and through this hole the mar ket women run string and carry it around for sale. In the bread market at Stockholm they fasten these strings of knackbrod to their shoulder | yokes in piles that reach from the yokes nearly to the ground. To an un- ! appreciative palate it tastes quite as much as it looks like dog biscuit and is tougher than any thing else the human teeth struggle with. Beside the knack- brod, the Swedes offer you many va rieties of sweet bread full of carroway seeds, and with the morning coffee give you plates of these fancy kickshaws, but never any plain white bread, and the coffee at Falun was something to make one shiver with disgust. The un- fortunate one who, following Mark Twain's old plan of saying: If this is coffee, give me tea; and if this is tea, give me coffee, and grandly ordered the coffee pot off the table, was sure she was poisoned when she had rashly swal- lowed some of the tea. Then we mourned that we had ever let ourselves be jolted more than hundred miles from Upsala to this dull, dead, stupid provincial town of Falun, and an En- glishman at an adjoining table further consoled us by telling our American miner that the Falun copper mines were not interesting and not worth seeing at all. "There're all under ground, you know" said the English man, ''and you have to have a man carry torches to see it. There's noth- ing picturesque there at all. "
 Despite the Englishman's kind infor- nation that the mines were under ground, we made ready and drove through the dreary line of villages that combine to make the town of Falun to the grufstuga, or mining office. The whole region was sere and desolate, covered with dump heaps, slag and refuse from the mine, and there was enough sulphur and vitriol in the ar to give us unpleasant sensations in our throats, although the inhabitants claim that these fumes have kept of cholera and pestilence in times past. This Falu rufra Falun mine), or stora koppar- berget (great copper mountain), has the other high sounding titles of the Purse" and the Treasury of Swe- den," and its yield was once equal to the revenues of the Eronu. The mine has been worked for over five hundred years, as is known by records, and all prehistoric mu- seums show how rich the bronze age was in Scandinavia, where the deposits of Falun and Oster Gosland only could supply the savages of those earlier cen turies. By the guides statistics the mine regularly yielded 3,S22 tons of copper annually during the seventeenth century. It now yields less than 800 tons annually. The company owning the mine numbered 1,2OO proprietors in 1916, and each of these shares is now worth little over $100 in our money. To any one who even knows about the copper mines of Lake Superior this Falun mine, withits poor ore, exhausted veins and high sounding titles, seems l small thing; and after seeing American mining methods and machinery, the diamond drills, electric lights and work going on night and day by hundreds of miners, the Treasury of Sweden' seems a poor and trifiing affair." Rubanlah. tn St. Louis Globe Democrat